There is one type of monitor that ticks nearly every box for high quality PC gaming. One that provides a good mix of resolution and high refresh rate, while still being realistically usable on today's most popular gaming hardware. I'm talking about the latest 27-inch 1440p IPS monitors that hit a whopping 165 Hz with support for adaptive sync.

The Acer Predator 21 X is a huge laptop that is packed with top notch gaming hardware. The headline feature is the curved IPS panel with a refresh rate of 120Hz that sports G-Sync technology. There is minor controversy about the size of the screen as the specification says 21-inches and our tape measure suggests 21.5-inches but what the heck, it’s a mere detail (and measuring a curved screen is an inexact science anyway.) The rest of the specification includes a mobile Core i7, dual GTX 1080 GPUs in SLI and a bunch of DDR4 memory along with a pair of SSDs in RAID 0. It’s a gaming beast of a laptop but that knowledge does not prepare you for the size and weight of the Predator 21 X.

Antlion Audio's ModMic 5 kit claims to give gamers the ability to add a high-quality headset microphone to any pair of headphones, gaming or otherwise. We stuck the ModMic on an otherwise fine headset with a deficient mic to see whether it could give our voice chatting more snap.

The cuplex kryos NEXT from Aqua Computer is an extremely customizable water block with features including an integrated display with a 32-bit ARM MCU, the ability to fit the block to your particular CPU, an industry-first physical vapor deposited titanium coating, and excellent performance overall to choose from. With over 90 different configurations ranging from $60 to $260, there is something to suit everyone.

When it comes to mechanical keyboards, a lot of the different designs tend to blend together because they all follow the same trends and styling. Don’t get me wrong, typically the keyboards that stray from the clean styles and RGB lighting that just about every keyboard has looks horrible. AZIO did a good job a while back with their MK Retro, I took a look at it last November. I had a few concerns but overall I loved the design but I felt like a design like this needed a little better construction to fit the classic look. Well AZIO is back at it again and they sent over a new keyboard that they are calling the Retro Classic. The model they sent over is an early production model and I will be checking out the retail sample once they get to that point, but today I’m going to look in on production and see how the new keyboard looks. I know it has backlighting and higher end materials but let's see what else.

If you are running VMWare ESXi, after you make certain configuration changes that doesnt have anything to do with ip-address change, you might get the following error message during the system startup.

HP is a brand you’ve had to hear of if you been following the PC industry for any length of time. HP has been at times the world’s leading PC manufacturer, and who would have thought it all started in a Palo Alto garage. In recent years HP still has a very large PC business, but they also have a very successful flash product division. The way HP solid state drives work is that HP licenses its name to other companies who build the drives, but each drive has to pass through HP’s internal qualification testing before it is released. Previous HP solid state drives have gone widely unnoticed as they were more mainstream drives. Well today we are taking a look at the new HP S700 Pro which features the SMI SM2258 controller as well as Micron 3D TLC NAND, the same combination we’ve seen in many enthusiast 2.5-inch solid state drives. Let’s jump in and see what this drive can do!

The HP Spectre X2 is, in many ways, the ideal way to counteract Microsoft's Surface lineup. It retains the slick, high-end style that we loved from the original model, while improving things a bit to make it much more user friendly.

Tempered glass is all the rage right now in the custom PC market. As a result, many case makers are releasing new designs with tempered glass in an attempt to cash in. But tempered glass is often more expensive than options such as plastic. Seeing this, In Win has released the 301 mini tower, a smaller mATX version of their successful 303 chassis design. In this article for Benchmark Reviews, we’ll take a closer at the In Win 301 SECC Tempered Glass Micro-ATX Mini Tower Computer Case, detailing the features included in this design, before delivering my final recommendation.

While we've already had a lot of fun testing a bunch of X299 motherboards, as well as the flagship Core i9-7900X, we're now cracking on with the new Core i7-7740X. The flagship CPU was fast, faster than anything we've ever tested, but how many people have £1000 to spend on a new CPU? Not many I would bet. However, the new quad-core 8-thread Core i7 looks set to please the masses, with a much more reasonable £330-ish price point. That's an interesting price for a quad-core Intel CPU right now. Let's not forget the 8-Core Ryzen 1700X is the same price, and I'm eager to see where the two stack up in a head to head battle.

How do you take a High-End Desktop (HEDT) platform laden with six-to-double-digit core count CPUs and make it more appealing to a wider mainstream audience? Add quad-core options, of course. Yes, that’s the utterly bizarre approach that Intel has taken with X299, putting consumers in a position where they can buy a quad-core processor on a platform designed for up to 18-core chips, quad-channel memory, and 28+ PCIe lanes. Adding salt to the wound, many X299 motherboards retail for more than the cost of the 4C8T Core i7-7740X (not to mention the Core i5-7640X!).

Anyway, can Intel’s $339 Core i7-7740X prove itself as a worthy option despite the cost increase of at least £100 over a comparable LGA 1151-based system, the forced obsolescence of numerous X299 platform features, and the removal of a sometimes-convenient integrated GPU for no reduction in purchase price to consumers? Maybe the Core i7-7740X will be aided by the 100MHz uptick in base frequency over the Core i7-7700K, or the increase in TDP, or the native support for DDR4-2666MHz memory.

With Ryzen hitting the market a few months ago, it was only a matter of time before Intel played their hand. Admittedly, we all feel like Intel may have rushed their new Skylake-X hardware to market a little earlier than expected. However, with a 10-core 20-thread design, as well as improvements to the cache and VRM design, new instruction sets, and more, we're still expecting great things from the Core i9.

Intel Pentium G4560 dual-core socket LGA1151 processor is too good for Intel's comfort. For the past two generations, Intel has enabled HyperThreading on Pentium dual-core chips, and expanded L3 cache amount from 2 MB to 3 MB; which were the two key differentiators for the company's Core i3 desktop lineup from Pentium. HyperThreading was warranted by an increasing number of games and applications which wouldn't work without at least 4 logical CPUs. The G4560 is a formidable part at its USD $64 price - 2 cores, 4 threads, the latest "Kaby Lake" micro-architecture, 3 MB L3 cache, and 3.50 GHz clock speeds. On the flip side, it makes buying Core i3 dual-core parts close to double its price a dumb option. Intel's solution? Effectively kill it.

According to a DigiWorthy report, Intel has decided to scale down production of the Pentium G4560 in a bid to cripple its availability, and force consumers to opt for pricier 7th generation Core i3 parts. The cheapest part, the Core i3-7100, is priced almost double that of the G4560, at $117. You get the same two "Kaby Lake" cores, 4 threads enabled by HyperThreading, the same 3 MB L3 cache, but slightly higher clock speeds of 3.90 GHz, and a faster integrated graphics core, if you use one. Does the extra 400 MHz warrant double the price? Not even in the case of Intel's priciest Core i7 SKUs.

Max respect when respect is due. Engage fanboy thrusters. Behold a short, extremely enthusiastic article summarizing several months of Kubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus usage, with near-perfect results, including great aesthetics, continuous improvements, excellent media and smartphone support, great performance, rock-solid stability, tons of features and goodies, plus an optimistic message for the future. Best of all, this smacks of genuine professionalism. Take a look.

Viking Technology has just announced their new Silo Sold State Drive, with two new SSDs arriving in both 25TB and 50TB capacities. 50TB is a new world record for the industry's highest capacity SSD, with the UHC-Silo SSD able to hold years worth of data for high-end datacenter deployment.